You Are The Beginning
Written by Ms Klára SOMMEROVÁ (Czech Republic)
The 5th ASEF Young Leaders Summit (ASEFYLS5) took place from August to December 2023. It focused on the theme of ‘Leadership & Society 5.0’ and incorporates 3 spheres for youth leadership: 1) self-leadership (you), 2) team leadership (we) and 3) societal leadership (all). The 5th edition was a hybrid project with collaborative elements taking place online and in Salamanca, Spain.
Driven by endless curiosity and intention to develop my leadership and mentoring skills, I took a bold move, skipped the usual leadership coaching courses, and applied to become a Navigator of the 5th ASEF Young Leaders Summit (ASEFYLS5). Here are the important learnings.
It was the last week of November; I sat in Krakow listening to Ukrainian journalists talk about their struggles to ethically incorporate artificial intelligence into newsrooms, while in parallel battling the war related content. The discussion included a number of topics connected to failure, acceptance, and need for adjustments as they were navigating the new realm previously unknown to news production. A few days after, during a gathering within the data community in Prague, a majority of IT developers confirmed that their work on artificial intelligence assignments increased from 0 to about 80% just in the past year. It was a signal of a completely new era. You get the idea.
As a lawyer working in the tech field with a parallel master’s degree in journalism, my hope was that interdisciplinarity would be a key component for better orientation in a society seemingly dealing with more and more complex issues. Whether in geopolitics, innovations, policy making, environment, sustainability, or international cooperation. In other words, a society which has shifted towards uncertainty, needs for a tremendous amount of adaptability and, inevitably, change. Then there was the obvious question: how do you lead in such unpredictable conditions?
Understanding privilege and inequalities in access to technology
Looking back at the previous months engaged as a Navigator in the 5th ASEF Young Leaders Summit (ASEFYLS5), and meeting the participants from 51 countries, I have begun to realise just how much our perspectives on life are shaped by the geographical location and life privileges we often take for granted. For instance, in terms of access to technology at an EU level, and the fact that we ultimately lead the way and impact other countries via regulation on a “first come, first serve” basis; or the fact that some were born with an extreme family support system allowing them to grow with various opportunities not present in other parts of the world. One of my key personal reminders from the programme is thus that having this privilege should go hand in hand with the obligation to use it in the best interest of others.
The second observation leads to the area of technological progress towards Society 5.0, a visionary concept originating in Japan, and core theme of ASEFYLS5. By definition, the idea expects connectivity between the real space and cyberspace, leveraging large amounts of data for the solution of societal challenges and benefit of citizens. Its foundations are deeply linked to the Sustainable Development Goals, meaning that if Society 5.0 is implemented in Japan, essential findings can be mirrored to achieve the SDGs as well. Nonetheless, the scope of paradoxes and dependencies within the area of innovation is, at the moment, too vast. From my perspective, there is no real innovation at the expense of the environment, no progress when your supply chain is connected to an unstable geopolitical situation, no human-centred society without humans actively shaping it and taking active part in related decision-making processes. Hence, the envisaged visionary direction might first and foremost need rethinking of the current status quo. Society 5.0 represents tremendous ambition, there is, however, an extreme amount of work and roadblocks ahead of us which we need to put under scrutiny to be able to embrace the beneficial prospects fully.
Does the fast forward tech approach make us anxious?
The above focus on technological progress brings me to the assigned ASEFYLS5 challenge which we have been working on in a multinational team comprising of members placed across Europe and Asia. How do you solve the emerging issue of digital anxiety and ensure digital wellbeing? Is the hypothesis of emerging digital anxiety even correct? And, last but not least, how do you guide a team on a topic none of you have expertise in?
During our first encounter in Salamanca, I started by asking the team to define their personal value in one or two words. Based on the outcome, we derived a common team value to keep us going till the end of the project. Interestingly, all personal motivations had a common denominator — people — an integral part of the design thinking process. Little did I know at the time that I was implementing the same approach taken by Maria Ressa, journalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, when reshaping the media environment in the Philippines. She elaborates on the topic in her fantastic book “How to stand up to a dictator.” Read it if you have a chance, it is a leadership masterclass at its best. Ressa emphasised her mission to create a culture built on transparency, accountability, and consistency which, if embedded in the right way, is not dependent on who is leading it. It is determined purely by the personal and team values of its members.
So, we embarked on a two-month long journey with the aim to understand whether technology and omnipresent hunger for everything new, progressive, and innovative is making us anxious, overloaded, sometimes fearful and unsure on what decision to take. Our efforts resulted in a terrific research report covering responses from 26 countries and direct testimonies of young people battling digital anxiety. The human-centred approach became a main propelling factor behind the report and so did a list of solutions the team has recommended to implement. However, the worrying aspect is a seemingly undetected trend of digital information fatigue of respondents, followed by various strategies to escape the online world rather than to actively engage in it. In short, direct opposition to a society striving for technological excellence, which is the reason why we urge for more attention in this area.
From curiosity to defining authentic leadership style
With much gratitude to the ASEF team for challenging us as Navigators along the way, and for the unique chance of personal and professional growth we have all experienced, the leadership lessons I am taking with me further are the following:
1) True leadership means empowering the team to have their own voice, take chances and risks, balancing the team members, and allowing them to operate in their zone of genius.
2) True leadership is trusting the team before any trust is developed.
3) True leadership is having the discipline to continuously create a better version of yourself.
4) True leadership, by definition, means that you need failure to grow, understand the mistakes, learn from them, and succeed eventually. So next time you can fail better and repeat the cycle with greater triumphs.
The day after the final challenge presentations, which left us all with mixed feelings of relief, gratefulness, and sadness, the team sent the following text to our WhatsApp group: “Hey, a couple of us were chatting, we want to continue working on the challenge and progress with the research on digital anxiety.”
The wording defines it all. Organisations change, teams change, leaders come and go. The culture and values remain, and that is a way in which I would like to explore and shape the type of leadership that is authentic to me — one I have discovered throughout the whole ASEFYLS5 programme. Therefore, my message to the upcoming ASEF Young Leaders Summit cohorts in my native language is the following: “Jsi začátek,” which translates to: “You are the beginning.” Make it count.
Klára Sommerová (Czech Republic) holds master’s degrees in both Law and Journalism and currently works as Legal Counsel for UK and Italian markets at Reckitt Benckiser specialising on data and innovations. She has experience in law firms working on media law, entertainment law, intellectual property, data protection and IT law, as well as projects involving AI and IoT innovations. Klára is active in events organised by the European Youth Press, the European Parliament, European University Institute in Florence as well as the Council of Europe and is an alumna of the Aspen Young Leaders Program. She regularly devotes her time to publishing, lecturing, and promoting the need for transformation of media ethics and literacy on local and EU level through various nonprofit projects. Klára is an ASEFEdu Alumna since 2018. In 2023, she was selected as one of the navigators of ASEFYLS5 programme representing Czech Republic.
NOTE:
The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely by the author(s) and do not represent that of the Asia-Europe Foundation (ASEF).
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